The rich are weird

Donald Trump is one of the most Twitter-obsessed freaks I’ve heard tell of, but he doesn’t quite seem to understand how the medium works.

But the most eye-popping revelation from Politico’s dive into Trump’s reading habits is his decidedly analog method for “liking” tweets. First, a quick reminder of the accepted method for liking tweets: Click the heart.

Now, Trump’s method for “liking” tweets:

The president has even been known to sends printouts of tweets he likes. After he liked one Gaetz tweet, he had it printed by a staffer, signed it and requested that it be sent to Gaetz’s congressional office, where the now-framed tweet hangs.

Recalling Trump’s past as a hotelier, Gaetz said, “This is the proverbial Trump gift basket waiting for you in your suite or sent to you.”

He’s like a caricature of an old, out-of-touch grandpa. This is not how any of this works.

It’s also deeply bizarre that someone would frame a tweet and hang it on their wall.

In other general fucking rich people news, wealthy parents are transferring responsibility (on paper) for their kids to their poorer friends.

Amid an intense national furor over the fairness of college admissions, the Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some suburbs here, in which wealthy parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid, say people familiar with the matter.

They give an example.

One Chicago-area woman told The Wall Street Journal that she transferred guardianship of her then 17-year-old daughter to her business partner last year. While her household income is greater than $250,000 a year, she said, she and her husband have spent about $600,000 putting several older children through college and have no equity in their home, which is valued at about $1.2 million, according to the property website Zillow. She said she has little cash on hand and little saved for her daughter’s education.

Transferring her daughter’s guardianship was largely a matter of paperwork, the mother said. Her business partner attended a court hearing with an attorney. She, her husband and her daughter didn’t even need to show up, she said. Once the guardianship was transferred, the teen only had to claim the $4,200 in income she earned through her summer job, the mother said.

Today, her daughter attends a private college on the West Coast which costs $65,000 in annual tuition, she said. The daughter received a $27,000 merit scholarship and an additional $20,000 in need-based aid, including a federal Pell grant, which she won’t have to pay back. The daughter is responsible for $18,000 a year, which her grandparents pay, the woman said.

Whoa. When my kids were starting college, I was making $40K/year, and we didn’t even own a home — we were renting. Yet we managed to scrimp and save and get all three kids through four years of college. So that family is bringing in a quarter million per year, and they haven’t managed to set aside any money for their kids’ education? What have they been spending their money on? That kid is getting $20K that could have gone to someone who really needed it. The woman openly admitted to robbing poorer people, and she’s probably proud of her cleverness.

Close those loopholes, and publicly shame the rich. That’s all we can do.

Zero tolerance for new questions and ideas

If you’ve ever heard a conservative complain that those danged liberals at the danged liberal universities discriminate against conservative thought, using those magic words “viewpoint discrimination”, just tell them to go read this article by a former editor at the Liberty University campus paper, the Champion. They’ll see what real viewpoint discrimination is like, because it is clear that Jerry Falwell Jr is a petty tinpot dictator.

…when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

If only you knew what faculty at my liberal university think of our student newspaper — there has been many a facepalm at sloppy grammar, bad writing, and strangely inappropriate articles. But it’s because it is student-run, and they’re learning. I can’t quite imagine our chancellor or our faculty demanding control over what they can write.

But then, we’re not trying to run a “culture of fear” here.

What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

Falwell is a Trump fanatic. He endorsed Trump and promoted him before his election, and it’s just unbelievable that the president of a university would favor a guy who is functionally illiterate and who promotes ignorance, but then the article includes a video of Falwell giving a speech. He’s terrible. I’ve had first-year students give better, clearer, less stilted speeches in class than this guy — his delivery is flat, he stammers over his “jokes”, he looks like he’s constantly searching for an exit. He’s not charismatic at all. He’s a talentless yahoo who inherited a fake university from his daddy.

If the students are pawns, I don’t even want to imagine the status of the faculty.

The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote . . . free market processes” and “affirm . . . that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

On the one hand, that is a horrible situation for an academic to be trapped in, and it’s not just Liberty University’s fault — the entire system is designed to devalue educators, with Liberty just the bottom of the fermenting barrel. On the other hand, Liberty is the apotheosis of conservative Christian principles…so why is anyone surprised that it’s an academic hell-hole?

Child murderer was a white nationalist

Who is surprised? The recent shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival was perpetrated by an angry young man with racist views.

Legan also shared his views that include fringe white supremacist book written in 1890. Called “…one of the most incendiary works ever to be published anywhere,” by a noted anarchist, Legan quoted from the book in a post accompanied by a Smokey the Bear sign about fire danger. He wrote: “Read Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”

According to the book Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Subculture, Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard was authored under a pseudonym. It is purported to expand on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “theories of master–slave morality and herd mentality …”

The book is described as being akin to Social Darwinism and includes misogynistic and racist principles “claiming that the woman and the family as a whole is the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”

Please do go on about how antifa is a dangerous organized gang. So far, they’ve killed no one, while these right wing thugs are running up the score. This guy murdered a 6 year old child and seriously wounded his mother and grandmother!

East Side Park is infested with wild gangs of juvenile mammals

The cartoon is a lie. We’ve been to many playgrounds looking for spiders, and there is a consistent pattern. If you visit a neglected park, like Dogpoop Park that we visited yesterday, you’ll find lots of webs dangling everywhere under the equipment (whether the owner is at home at the time is a different question). Go to a park heavily trafficked in children, and the place is bare of spiders and their webs. I’m pretty sure children eat spiders and pretend cobwebs are cotton candy.

So this morning Mary and I visited Eastside Park, which is probably the most popular park in town. There are picnic tables everywhere, a large shelter, a band shell, and two playground areas with slides and swings and all that good stuff. One thing it doesn’t have is a lot of spiders.

I mean, seriously, what is the point?

We did have some success prowling about the band shell, which has complex siding with many crevices to hide in, and we found a few spiders cowering there. I think they’re terrified of carnivorous children. There were mainly Theridiidae lurking about, and curiously, they were uniformly Steatoda borealis, the Boreal Combfoot. They are pretty false widows. I like the mottled pattern on my friends, Parasteatoda, but the boreals are also nice, with solid dark black to reddish purple body and an elegant white band on the front of their abdomen.

So not a total waste of time. It would be a much more interesting hunting ground if we could get rid of the roving bands of kids. That park is full of pernicious children every time I pass by on a sunny day.

Jared Kushner, slumlord

Last week, our fool president went on another Twitter rant, in this case blaming Representative Elijah Cummings, who has been a thorn in his side by simply being an upright, moral human being, of being responsible for the “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” that is Baltimore. This is ironic coming from a New Yorker, home of Pizza Rat, but whole new levels of amusement are added when you learn that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, is a major Baltimore area slumlord.

In 2017, Baltimore County officials revealed that apartments owned by the Kushner firm were responsible for more than 200 code violations, all accrued in the span of the calendar year. Repairs were made only after the county threatened fines, local officials said, and even after warnings, violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions.

In an investigation by the New York Times and Pro Publica published earlier that year, tenants of Kushner properties reported mouse infestations, mold problems and maggots. A private investigator who looked into Kushner’s property management company, Westminster Management, described the managers as “slumlords.”

“Basically, [Kushner] has been creating a race to the bottom in terms of poorly maintained properties,” she said. “He’s been very, very deeply implicated.”

In the past two years, the Kushner firm and its affiliated entities have been sued multiple times by Baltimore-area residents who allege that the company has charged them excessive fees and used the threat of eviction to pressure them into paying.

I’ve been to Baltimore several times. It’s a fine city, with character and a beautiful downtown (I also like visiting New York), and it’s amazing how petty that demagogue Trump can get when he’s lashing out. He fully deserved what the editor of the Baltimore Sun wrote about him.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

Impeach that monster. I can’t believe the Democrats have been dragging their heels about confronting a man so manifestly unfit for office.

AXP has been axed

I closed comments and new posting, but The Atheist Experience was still left up here at FtB. Despite requesting some recommendations from the Atheist Community of Austin, what’s left of it, for what to do with the blog, I’ve heard nothing from them. So this evening a removed it from FtB’s roster for good.

What a freakin’ mess. Matt and his transphobic crew really did a great job of flushing a fine organization down the tubes.

Optical illusion, or weird injury?

I was walking home from the lab, when I saw this utterly motionless dragonfly perched on a signpost. I looked at it closely, and there seemed to be something unusual about it –the back of its head was gone, with a sharp boundary at the eyes. It looked like it had been surgically snipped out, but that seemed so improbably, I thought it had to be some kind of illusion.

Then I touched it and it flew away.

I keep telling everyone, in case of a zombie insect invasion, they have a ventral nerve cord, so aim for the throat, not the top of the head.

What should atheists support?

I received a long email complaining about the priorities of American Atheists. To distill it down a lot…

To use American Atheist (AA) resources to continue
pressing issues that are predominantly
LGTB is, in my opinion, a dereliction of duty, unwise
and possibly actionable.

Please remember that AA members are,
primarily and traditionally, interested in
separation of church and state issues.

Why?

I agree completely on the importance of church/state separation, and I think it’s important to get religion out of our schools, for instance. But why? Think about the deeper motivations behind atheism.

There are many reasons why people should oppose religion. I oppose it because it’s antithetical to good science, and that religion is used by people to endorse ideas that are contrary to the evidence. I consider that a very good reason.

Another very good reason, though, is that religion is behind many of the most repressive policies in this country. It fosters misogyny, child rape, the oppression of LGBTQ people, and a whole raft of vicious discriminatory ideas that harm those who don’t conform. It’s antithetical to healthy social practices, and that is a perfectly valid reason for atheists to fight back. It’s not just for science, or for anti-clericalism, or for legal agendas…many oppose religion because it is a social ill, and they may legitimately find common cause with other atheists for that reason. LGBTQ people need atheism, too, and they may care about other aspects of our culture than that “In God We Trust” is on our money.

It’s funny how Big Tent Atheism only wants to share the tent with cis het privileged white people who only want to talk about the Constitution as holy writ.

Also, it’s really weird to send me a letter like that when I’ve been ostracized from the formal atheist community for arguing that social issues ought to be as important to us as the scientific and legal ones. They don’t know me very well, I guess.